“We stand at the threshold of a new world and a new identity that is spurred on to assume its role within a broader environment.” (Lewis Mumford)
Today we are meeting our fate. What will come next? We will only be able to start over again should it eventually be understand that it is our common responsibility. It is the responsibility of every single human being.
It is all about climate change in our minds and the way we think. When I founded the Earthrise Society two years ago, it was clear to me that we humans could not possibly continue living on ours planet the way we had before without causing irreparable harm. We find ourselves in an extremely critical situation.
For quite some time now there have been people who have recognized that in the long run humanity and the Earth could not continue to exist in this way. Many non-profit organizations have been formed with the idea of saving ourselves and our beautiful planet. Yet we cannot afford to continue existing at the expense of the poor and the weak.
The Earthrise Society is working specifically with those persons who have come to this recognition. The time is here for us to stop merely thinking of the needed new ideas. NOW is the time to actually implement them in practice. The intellectual world will help us understand the situation and risk taking this important step.
I am convinced that in part this will occur quite unobtrusively. The future of our society is changing. Our human life will only become more sustainable if we are all prepared to take the necessary initiatives. Sustainability means a society that can meet its needs without damaging the prospects of future generations.
On the 30th of October, 2011 the world population reached 7 billion. This means a net increment of 1 billion over the past ten years. Based on this trend, the U.N. Population Fund predicts that, at the end of this century, world population will reach 10 or even 15 billion. This is a linear thinking that one deduces the future performance of a system from its past performance. The curves of population are full of non-linear changes in history. For example, for about one thousand years, from the Han-dynasty to the Song-dynasty, the population of China has been oscillating between 55 million and 15 million. When the country was united and society stabilized, population increased to 55 million, but when there was internal warring, famine and infectious disease, it reduced to 15 million.
In the 20th century, as the globalization of industry civilization continues, world population has been increasing, but on the other hand environment pollution, the greenhouse effect and resource shortness also continue; and if these negative factors are not kept in check, they will create wars for resources, natural calamities and famines. As a result the global population would be reduced to 5 or 6 billion.
Today’s monetary and financial system has become manifestly dysfunctional on an unprecedented scale. Although the on-going crisis is the biggest since the 1930s, it certainly isn’t the first. The IMF has identified 145 banking crises, 208 monetary crashes and 72 sovereign debt crises between 1970 and 2010.[1] Furthermore, these different types of crises are in fact different symptoms of a common systemic problem: a banking crisis can lead to a sovereign debt problem (e.g. Ireland), a sovereign debt problem to a monetary crisis (e.g. Greece); and a monetary crisis to a banking problem. In total, there have been 425 systemic crises over the past 40 years; averaging out to more than 10 per year! Such crises have affected three-quarters of the 187 countries that are members of the IMF, many of them several times.
Until now, governments have kept on borrowing from the financial system to bail out banks. They have been tinkering at the margins with regulations, but always without touching the monetary structure itself. How many more crises do we need to live through, before systemic problems are addressed with systemic solutions?
Back in the 1930s, the U.S. considered two types of solutions:
The “Chicago Plan” that would let governments issue the national money, and where banks would play only a brokerage role of allocating savings without creating money themselves. This radical solution was successfully resisted by the banking lobby.
The separation between commercial and investment banking, which took the form of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1934. This Act has been formally repealed in the US in November 1999, and variations of it are currently being considered for reinstatement in the UK and the US. While such regulations would be an improvement for the countries involved, they clearly don’t go deep enough to address global instabilities. For instance, during the 30 years before the repeal of Glass-Steagall, no less than 367 systemic crises happened around the world.
As the leaders of the G-20 prepare to meet in Cannes on 3rd/4th November, their discussions will be focused on the global financial system and seeking to ensure economic recovery. Their worthy agenda is described by host Nicolas Sarkozy as being “ambitious but realistic” in terms of strengthening financial regulation, co-ordination of economic policies, reforming the IMF and improving global governance, combating commodity price volatility and working on behalf of development.
However, the virtually complete lack of radical reform and clearing out of the financial system, both urgently needed, seem unlikely to be addressed by the G-20 leaders.
Issues that require fundamental, pressing and coordinated actions but which are not on the agenda for the G-20 Summit or indeed any other forum are; the regulation and taxation of shadow banking regimes such as hedge funds and private equity operations; dramatically reducing and regulating the vast scale and danger of the casino banking activities of derivatives trading (including commodities speculation and burgeoning complexity of ETF products); acknowledging and writing off the still enormous level of toxic assets remaining on corporate balance sheets, dealing with the unsustainable level of sovereign debt, immediately firewalling banking between retail and trading operations and properly accounting for the huge and growing level of off balance sheet and contingent debt especially governmental pensions liabilities.
In Cannes, my WS-20 Council colleagues and myself will instead of the limited agenda of the G-20 discussions be aiming to put forward proposals to deal effectively, comprehensively and resolutely with these untenable and destructive aspects of the financial system that are threatening the very basis of global society.
In recent years, Darwin’s evolutionary theory has been moderated to a view of slow incremental modifications punctuated by rapid transformative changes. The former applies during stable epochs, as the entire ecosystem and environment gradually optimize their co-creative fitness. Revolutionary leaps, whether biological or psychological, occur however because there is no other option.
In times of great stress, when pre-existing environments, whether physical, social, or both become unsustainable gradual change is no longer able to maintain equilibrium and the forces of revolutionary evolution are energized.
Since the end of the last Ice Age, the relative stability of our global physical environment has supported our consequentially gradual evolution. Whilst we have come a long way in terms of technological adaptation, we’ve done so with comparatively minimal increases in the level of our awareness. That disparity has brought us to the current state of global unsustainability. And as famously pointed out by Einstein, we can’t solve the issues that such awareness has caused, without transcending its limited perspective.
We’re now at a point in our collective evolution when there is no other option. Only a revolutionary leap will suffice if we are to survive and evolve as a species. Now though it’s an evolutionary shift in consciousness rather than a biological leap of species that is underway.
As with all such revolutionary change, the impetus for such emergence arises, not from the dominant species of an ecosystem or the vested interests of the status quo; those with the perception of having the most to lose by change. Instead, in our collective psyche at this pivotal moment the emergent awareness is being embraced by those who are releasing the fears that have imprisoned them. With courage and hope, they are striving towards a better future, not just for themselves but for the greater good of people and planet.
It makes sense to paraphrase Einstein’s famous dictum in regard to consciousness. Our problem is the unsustainability of the world we have created, and we should be clear that we can’t solve this problem with the same kind of consciousness that gave rise to it.
But many people try to do just that, even the leaders of the world’s twenty richest and most powerful nations. The November 2010 meeting of the G20 in Seoul gave indisputable proof of it. Not only did the meeting fail to achieve its main objectives (among them rebalancing international trade and reaching an accommodation between the U.S. and South Korea), the objectives themselves proved to be out-of-date. They centered on re-stabilizing the same moribund economic and financial system that made the world unsustainable in the first place.
But why is the G20’s failure due to wrong consciousness? Because consciousness in the social, political, and cultural context is sum total of our view of the world, with its values, aspirations, and background assumptions. It’s the “paradigm” that underlies the way we think and the way we set our priorities. The consciousness of the G20 gives rise to an obsolete view of the world, with faulty values and outdated aspirations. The leaders view the world as the arena for a Darwinian struggle for survival, seen as a competition for growth in the economies of nations. Since assured growth cannot be achieved even by the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world by itself, the leaders recognize the need for some level and form of cooperation—as a means to an end. The end is for the rich nations to make sure that they remain rich.
If the GDP grows and the trade balance is positive, all is well, nothing more is needed. It appears that the leaders are convinced that all that any person or nation in the world could reasonably ask for is to make money, preferably more money than its neighbor. That the world in which this competition takes place is perilously balanced at the edge of climatic and resource-disasters—and that at the same time it’s thoroughly equipped with nuclear and other hi-tech weapons to make the worst of any crisis coming its way—seems to have escaped their attention.
I am happy to report that the presentation of the WS-20 Declaration in Hong Kong went smoothly and was deeply appreciated by all the people present at the Asia Consciousness Festival.
It began with an inspiring video speech by Deepak Chopra from California (see below), then a similar-length live Internet hookup with Hiroshi Tasaka from Japan, followed by my own remarks about the purpose and mission of the WorldShift Council, and the highlights of the Declaration itself. The entire event of a little over one hour was recorded on video and will be made available to us for posting here, and on the websites of our Members as they may wish.
My deepest appreciation to all WS-20 members for the superb work of collaboration and wisdom that went into the Declaration. And let me add at this time my own sincere thanks to David Woolfson and Claudia Welss for their great work in helping to draft it.
The ship is heading into iceberg territory, but passengers in first class squabble among themselves to secure a safe spot on the upper deck. Does that make sense? To the leaders of the twenty richest and most powerful nations of the world, it apparently does.
The Leaders’ Declaration of the Seoul Summit of the G20 reads like a report of finance and trade managers faced with short-term emergencies. It centers on international trade disequilibria, discriminating exchange rate policies, volatile capital flows, and the threat of financial crises. It ignores the fact that the entire system in which these problems appear is in danger. That system is not just a financial and international trade system, but the system of human communities in the embrace of nature on the planet. It is destabilized by economic, social, and cultural conflict among peoples, and the deterioration of the ecologies that support life on Earth. The international community is equipped to make the worst of these threats: it maintains vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction on hair-trigger alert. The ship is in danger of hitting an iceberg ahead, but its influential passengers refuse to recognize that it’s going the wrong way. They only see the crises that would inconvenience their comfort and threaten their privileges on board.
The Action Plan agreed by the G20 leaders is a case study in narrowly focused short-term crisis management. It centers on five policy areas listed in this order: monetary and exchange rate policies, trade and development policies, fiscal policies, financial reforms, and structural reforms. Structural reforms are limited to boosting and sustaining global demand, fostering job creation, contributing to global rebalancing, and increasing “our growth potential.” The effectiveness of such reforms could hardly have inspired the confidence of the leaders themselves: at the conclusion of the Summit, President Obama felt compelled to go on television to address a plea to China and other trade surplus nations to stop growing by exporting to the United States.
I strongly hold that this WS-20 Declaration [we are about to publish] is a crucial document for the re-genesis of humanity and its societies. Taking a whole system approach for this, the most critical time in human history, the document makes plain that the decisions we make in the next few years will determine whether we grow or die, whether the 13.8 billion year experiment that resulted in our lives will end within the next century or two.
What the world so desperately needs at this time is patterns for peaceful, passionately creative and effective societies, and with those patterns, peaceful, passionately creative and effective people—in other words, the possible human in the possible society. The growth of consciousness is the paramount key to the necessary transition to a world that works for everyone, most particularly for the planet.
The document reminds us that we are here because we are present at the birth of an opportunity that exceeds our imagination. Christopher Fry writes,
“Thank God, our time is now, when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took.”
We are called to take initiatives that until recently would have seemed unlikely, if not downright impossible. But now the world has been rearranged, the reset button has been hit. We no longer have the luxury of sloth, continuing in the same world-destructive patterns. But what to do? Where to go? How to take initiative? And what is key here? How to understand our roles as world servers and social artists in this most compelling moment of human history? What qualities of mind, body and spirit can overcome the limitations we feel? How do we go about becoming stewards of the planet filled with enough passion for the possible to partner with one another through the greatest social transformation ever known?
Humanity is the prisoner of silo thinking in major meetings such as those of the G-20. Negotiators from leading economies build upon narrowly specialized agendas inherited from the past, acting in the name of creating more and faster economic growth to make narrowly defined economic coordination problems more negotiable—and then political leaders show up for the photo opportunity. Today, the fallout of our past economic activities is adding to the agenda with looming climate, ecology and energy crises that are carefully set aside in meetings such as this. However, the planet is a living system whose multiplying crises are no longer isolable into specialty areas, but are crowding onto every agenda. The kind of economic growth that the G-20 agenda treats as a panacea is simple quantitative increase of the same unsustainable economic system that is already killing the planet’s climate and ecologies. We need economic redevelopment, that is, structural change in the world’s economies, so that our children and grandchildren may live in a world that is worth living in, not one wrecked by the G-20 economies.
Civil society critics are often prisoners of our metaphors as well, so until we change the metaphor, we don’t really understand the crises we see coming. We’re not merely on the Titanic about to run into a single iceberg, and we’re not merely driving our car dangerously toward the edge of a single cliff. Try this metaphor: We’re entering an era of a cascade of crises:It’s as if humanity goes whitewater rafting, but we’re not remotely ready for the cascading rapids ahead. We’re about to find out if we can live in a world in perpetual crises, lurching from one to the next, each crisis feeding still more crises. It could kill us.
The time has come for the leading governments of the world to develop a new social function vital for the survival and thriving of human civilization and Earth life itself.
As various global crises deepen, so also are the positive responses to these crises growing. Out of emergencies are coming emergences. Out of breakdowns breakthroughs are arising everywhere. But they have not yet been connected or communicated as aspects of a whole system.
We need a new partnership between governments and citizens’ actions.
What is required now is a new function to enhance social synergy and cooperation of what is creative and emergent leading to a whole system world shift. This Function can now be done on the Internet. Its purpose is to scan for, map, connect and communicate what is working in the world country by country, community by community.
I recommend that there be created in major nations, and eventually everywhere, this new function. As in our war rooms we track enemies and how to defeat them, so in our global peace rooms we should be tracking innovations and how to encourage and communicate them.
This process could lead to cultivating the positive, what works — the good works of the world’s peoples. It would give us examples of creative solutions and inspiring action. It would bring hope in times of fear and despair. It would teach us what is working to solve problems and create solutions. It could mobilize the media to seek out and communicate the new news of what is actually new in the world toward solving problems and realizing new possibilities.
The natural world has value independent of the markets of man and we ignore this fact at our peril.
Corporations and states can no longer operate as if they are independent of the natural world. Nature will not bend beyond limits to fulfill corporate growth. Corporations, states and individuals must conform to the dictates of nature. Isn’t it time we developed a bit of humility? Without the billions of ants the human community cannot survive. Yet, without humans ants will do just fine. An accurate perspective could do us all well.
The extension of human will over the natural world through science, technology and social organization has amplified its capacity for creativity and destruction. The main actors in expressing these two dynamics are limited liability de jure entities, mainly corporations, and states. Both organizational forms, as distinct from individual human beings, lack conscience. One form pursues power and the other wealth.
A duty of any state is to protect its citizens. Without entering into universal regimes to protect the global commons, the living systems upon which all civilization depends such as the rain forests, the climate, and the oceans, states cannot fulfill this basic function. Sovereignty can never be diminished by fulfilling this duty. In fact, only by entering into universal regimes can sovereignty be fulfilled today. Thus universal norms and values based on principles of harmony with nature, identification of shared interests in peace amongst states, and the rule of law are urgently needed. Based on such values cooperation must supplant the pursuit of domination as a means of obtaining security.
Although for a great many years—ever since the birth of the sensational Report of the Club of Rome in 1972—many facts, data, events and movements have blown a whistle of alarm in the world, we still haven’t changed for the better the situation of our planet.
We know that many authoritative international organizations, such as the United Nations and the G-20, have made many efforts for bringing about change, and that countless NGOs and grassroots groups have done so as well. But we also know that their efforts have been fragmented and didn’t come through quickly and powerfully enough.
What is wrong? Do we need more horror stories to make people take notice? Or an attack by denizens of another planet? Of course not.
I strongly believe that it is time to create a Concrete Action Plan for spreading and sharing planetary consciousness and oneness consciousness. I propose to make the elements of the plan simple and easy enough for everyone in the world to join and follow in everyday life. This must be a kind of an action plan for all passengers on space-ship Earth to build a better world.
I believe that our mission as the WorldShift Council is to provide the keystone for a new paradigm in our society, a platform for concrete action. We can do this by using the Web, by tweeting, by video-streaming… An integrated approach will allow us to connect humanity as one big family. This is the substance of the action plan I propose.
The WorldShift-20 Declaration will be a clarion call to those in global finance, which, unless fundamentally reformed, will continue to disorder every local ecosystem and society on our planet. My work, along with many in socially responsible investing, has been to reform markets from within. I hope this statement from our Transforming Finance group can also help accelerate the necessary transition now occurring toward a cleaner, greener, more equitable and sustainable future for our human family.
The Committee on Transforming Finance, a multinational network of career market participants—investors, asset managers, business executives, philanthropists, academics and financial authors—holds that the financial system is a global commons, and calls for a new set of rules that would allow it to be governed in full conformance with this reality. We as beneficiaries and active participants in capital markets affirm our responsibility to reform them from within, so that all those still-voiceless stakeholders who are now excluded and exploited can be heard, and their communities appropriately served. If we are to avoid future systemic failures in the global financial system, we must re-think the underlying design flaws that precipitated the financial crises. We must move beyond Bretton Woods, where this financial commons was first defined within a set of global rules and institutions in 1945, as well as beyond recent attempts at reforms that have not addressed fundamental questions, including:
What is the purpose of finance in human societies?
What human values and principles should guide finance and its institutions?
What are the limits of markets, money-based trading and transacting within the global commons?
How can finance serve equitable, ecologically-sustainable governance of the global commons (climate, biodiversity, oceans, atmosphere, space) while reducing inequality, respecting human rights and acknowledging non-market-based, traditional societies?
We live in a time of remarkable convergence. We are experiencing an unprecedented meeting of worldviews, belief systems, and ways of engaging reality. On the one hand, we have the remarkable advances of western science and technology—an international space station named Discovery, a cloned cat named Carbon Copy, and a computerized chess champion named Deep Blue. On the other hand, we now have access to the world’s wisdom and spiritual traditions in the course of a few key strokes on our computer keyboard. We are truly an interconnected, global, wired community.
It is also a time of enormous acceleration. New data are being created at a rate never before experienced in human history. We are bombarded by weapons of mass distraction as we race from one thing to another. We rush to catch up with snail mail, voice mail, email, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter… grappling with the realization that we will never catch up.
In the midst of such complexity, each of us is being called to new ways of being. We see the need for new choices, new paths for finding new solutions, new systems of governance, and new ways of relating to one another. We are being called to make decisions about actions and events in the world that are truly unprecedented. There is no Operator’s manual for living in the 21st century world. We are co-creating it as our lives unfold, together in our global civilization.
And it is in these times that we approach the meeting of the G-20. As never before conscious, aware leadership is called for from those in positions of power at every level of our social systems. Our world leaders are being asked to embrace the complexities and confusions of our times with honesty, clarity, and an awareness of their own social and emotional blinders—not a simple task.
The debate over humanity’s future must focus on the well-being of all human beings and the fundamental rules of international humanitarian law. Nuclear weapons, the ultimate threat to the planet, must be at the centre of the debate. The abolition of nuclear weapons is no longer just a lofty goal, a noble aspiration, an idealistic thought. It has become the irreducible essential for survival. It is the paramount human rights issue of our time. Peace is impossible as long as the threat of nuclear war hangs over our heads. A Nuclear Weapons Convention prohibiting the production as well as the use of all nuclear weapons in all circumstances is urgently needed. It will be constructed once the public rebels against the weapons that would destroy all life.
Two-thirds of all national governments have voted at the United Nations for negotiations on a convention to start. In 21 countries, including the five major nuclear powers, polls show that 76 percent of people support negotiation of a treaty banning all nuclear weapons. The European Parliament has voted for a convention along with a number of national parliaments. Mayors for Peace, comprising more than 4,000 cities around the world, is campaigning for it. Long lists of non-governmental organizations want it. In Japan, 14 million people signed a petition for it. The Secretary-General of the United Nations has endorsed it.
There is no doubt that historical momentum is building up. But the opposition is still strong. Nuclear weapons are about power, and governments have never given up that which they perceive as giving them strength. The powerful military-industrial complexes are still trading on a fear that has been driven into the public. There is a virtual mainline media blackout on the subject, which makes it all the harder to have national debates. Yet, despite these obstacles, the tide is turning. Having come this far, the promoters of a convention will not cease their efforts.
“Statesmen should be aware of the present elemental process of transition from the biosphere to the noosphere… The historic process is changing dramatically before our eyes… Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a powerful geological force. Humanity’s mind and work face the problem of reconstructing the biosphere in the interests of freely thinking mankind as a single entity. This new state of the world we are approaching without noticing it is the ‘Noosphere.’” Vladimir I. Vernadsky
The Group of Seven (G-7) – the seven most industrialized nations of the world – was covertly formed in 1973. Once the Cold War was over, in 1991, the G-7 went public, marking the triumph of capitalism and monetary politics as the dominating ideology of the New World Order. Following the transformation of the G-7 into the G-8, with the Russian finance minister joining those of Japan, Germany, USA, Canada France, Italy and the UK in setting global policy, the G-7 then spawned, but a few years ago, the G-20, the Group of 20 most affluent nations in the world.
More than just setting economic policies, the G-20 also deals with issues of poverty and global warming. The debacle of Copenhagen last December demonstrated the inability of the United Nations (and G-20) to overcome national and corporate interests to deal objectively with truly critical global issues. This tragic failure was due to a lack of understanding that the global crisis is actually a whole system crisis of the human spirit. By ignoring the spiritual dimension of human reality and continuing to reduce everything to matters of economics, the world will only spiral into greater and greater catastrophe. The G-20 perpetuates this perspective of failure. We are at a point in time when the spiritual dimension must become paramount in issues of decision making.
The efforts of the G-20 leaders to set aims for international economic cooperation are much appreciated. However, economic cooperation alone cannot resolve the many potential crises that menace the world’s future.
The key issue here, I believe, is that the G-20 leaders themselves did not create the world’s problems. Rather, these problems were created—and are still being created—by the daily words, thoughts, and decisions of each individual on Earth. A lack of gratitude toward the environment, exploitive treatment of animals, plants, and the world of nature, discrimination against people, cultures, and nations—these kinds of destructive behavior do not originate from the minds of a small group of leaders. Rather, they arise from the consciousness of each individual human being.
True solutions can be forged only when responsibility is taken by those who are generating a problem. Thus, even if the G-20 leaders were able to devise a flawless, all-encompassing plan for achieving perfect stability on Earth, that plan would avail us nothing unless the consciousness of each world citizen were in perfect accord with it. The task at hand, therefore, is not for us to rely on the G-20 leaders to guide the world forward, but rather for each one of us, as individuals, to take responsibility for uplifting our own consciousness, thereby safeguarding the future of our society and the planet Earth.
The ancient Chinese symbol for crisis, wei-chi, combines two elements: danger and opportunity. The danger is that if one continues to pursue approaches that are no longer working, then disaster is imminent. The opportunity is to let go of the old patterns and find new ways of being that unleash new, and possibly unforeseen, potentials.
The many global crises we are now facing are symptomatic of a set of values and a mode of thinking that is no longer working. Our tools and technologies have given us unprecedented control of the world around us. We have thus fallen into the trap of believing that the path to human fulfillment lies in manipulating the world around us, manufacturing ever more things, and so creating ever more waste. This is clearly no longer working. Over consumption of resources and unbridled pollution of the oceans, atmosphere and soil are now threatening human civilization, if not humanity itself.
This approach also no longer works on an individual level. Despite all our burgeoning material comforts people as a whole are no happier than they were fifty years ago. The need to feel in control of events leads to greed, anxiety and fear, states of mind that, by their very nature, take us away from the peace and fulfillment we truly seek.
Many in the past have seen through the illusion that fulfillment comes from what we have and do. We call them the wise ones, the liberated, the enlightened. These are people who have discovered a deeper meaning to life, an inner joy that is not dependent on circumstances, and a compassion that leads to care for other beings. Such people are often revered as saints, yet there is nothing special about them — apart from the fact that they have woken up from the dream in which the rest of us live. They hold the key to our future. A world in which we can live together, free from unnecessary fear, and in harmony with our surroundings.
Our various crises are pushing us towards this shift in consciousness, calling us to a collective awakening, and to a world governed by wisdom and compassion rather than greed and fear. The time to wake up is now. The danger is too immense to risk. The opportunity is too good to miss.
There are many crises affecting mankind and many others are still coming. All these crises are effects of the same cause: the lack of people’s planetary consciousness.
“Lack of planetary consciousness” means lack of an holistic perspective that embraces both humankind and the ecosystem.
In a democracy the majority rules, decides and imposes its laws and behavior. Unfortunately, people with a planetary consciousness are still the minority. As a matter of fact, market research estimates the percentage of people with such consciousness at only 30-40%. But if each of us would convince just one person who is still “on the other side” to embrace the values of planetary consciousness, we would become the majority. Markets and politics, and the things that people truly wish, would radically change, and the world itself would change.
What should we do?
Governments and multinational and local companies should develop a ‘People, Planet, Profit’ economy. They should pursue profit but respect people and the environment.
People themselves should internalize the following values:
To live with passion
To make sense of one’s life
To consume consciously
To respect the planet’s ecosystem and every form of life
To find a satisfying job
To be honest with oneself and with others
To do good
To choose genuine friends
To live with joy
Only in this way can we create the “right” shift to ensure the survival of humankind and, at the same time, take a fundamental step towards happiness in the human community.
A review of the G20 Cannes Declaration and the parallel WS20 Declaration gives the impression that there are two different worlds. The world of the G20 is one where the problem is economic instability and financial insecurity, and the remedy is to re-stabilize the economy and overcome the financial crisis. The world of the WS20 Declaration is a world where seven billion people share a small and highly exploited planet and face the urgent need to share it cooperatively, peacefully, and sustainably.
In the WS20 world economic and financial issues are not the real problem: they are manifestations and consequences of the real problem. The real problem is the way the social, political, economic, financial, and cultural system of this planet evolved in the last several decades. This is a multidimensional system that has come to be unilaterally dominated by the economy. In the dominant feature of the system the function of money is to make money, and without money fulfilling this function the system collapses: its persistence depends essentially on accumulating wealth for a powerful minority. However, the continued concentration of wealth entails the progressive marginalization of the majority, and the progressive overexploitation of natural resources and degeneration of the environment.
The growth required for the viability of the system has an endemic problem: it generates social and cultural crises, catalyzes political upheavals—and produces economic instability and financial crises. Concentrating on the latter is like trying to cure the symptom while leaving the malady out of account. Yet this is precisely what the leaders of the twenty richest and most powerful countries of the world propose to do.
The G20’s approach is at best a band-aid covering a festering wound. It will not work even in the medium-term; at the most it will postpone the onset of one or another crisis. But if the processes the trigger the crises continue unchecked, the next crisis will be greater and less amenable to temporary fixes.
For this reason the WS20 recommends that the G20 appoint an independent body composed of ethical and insightful individuals to examine the root causes of the problem and recommend effective measure for coping with it. The Independent Advisory Council (IAC) would make its findings available to the G20 at its 2012 Mexico Summit, and the G20 would place the review of the findings on the Summit’s agenda. The Independent Advisory Council’s findings would be made available to the general public, since in the final count in a democracy it is the people who are to lead. Through the IAC the WS20 intends to provide the information the people need to lead wisely and effectively.
In the WS20’s view if real progress is to be made toward building a peaceful, equitable, and sustainable world, there is no alternative to this approach.
“We stand at the threshold of a new world and a new identity that is spurred on to assume its role within a broader environment.” (Lewis Mumford)
